Social anxiety online

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MMO is Massive Multiplayer Online and refers to multi-player video games Tequila. It was meant to be funny but my humor doesn't seem to work on aspies in general lol

I got the joke
Boy would I hate to grind in that game. Sounds depressing!

lol never thought about grinding. Running around hugging everything?

I would play that, as long as voice communication weren't allowed and everyone were stuck to just texting

Yeah, I meant it more in the context of the thread! Not to worry.

Why do you suppose that happened to you?

I had a popular blog, chatted on MSN/ICQ/Y!M, often went on forums (including being owner of one and moderator of another), and played games like Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies - I can't for the life of me figure out why these days anything like this would be hard for me.

You might be "burned" out from so much communication via typing, as weird as that sounds or it could just be the fact that people are a lot meaner on the internet and online than they were in the early 2000s. People were always dicks, but I remember at one point before the facebook boom that online felt like my safe haven from the people and social interaction I feared so much. Well guess what? Thanks to iphones, wireless internet/communication and the popularity of facebook EVERYONE is online. Even if you use a separate alias it still feels...really weird, maybe that's more my inner latent hipster (ugh) saying "EVERYONE IS ON THE INTERNET NOW WAHH".

With me I think one day I finally realized no one gave a s**t what I had to say on livejournal, my blog, or on forums. I realized my personality online was just as autistic and people somehow could pick it up even through words, there was just no issue with eye contact and stuff. I just thought, "Why bother..?" and started shutting myself off to everyone, living in my own little world.

Hey bloodheart, maybe because in the past the Internet was home to only the smart, the quirky and interest groups. Now it's become a lot more domestic, and overpopulated with domestic and common opinions. And with this the entitlement complex, requirement to interact and dominate other opinions has increased dramatically. Even the fun things you mentioned are this day and age more stressful and open to criticisms. I too ran a lot of things, had extensive commitments to online games and now I don't even have many friends on any messenger programs. The Internet is a very different place from when you were more active (sounds like 2003-2005?). Maybe this has played a big part in your reclusion.

You're so right here, I also really hate the "trolling" culture now, back in the day you had sites like SomethingAwful but for the most part their kind of harassment was very different. Sites would get the ALOD (awful link of the day) and someone would snip quotes and captions, heckling it. Some sites and communities I went to got ALOD ironically but it was nowhere near the level of what we have now, where every kid wants to be a master troll. I also really hate the new lingo people use in games.

Let's face it, the Internet has always had creeps but its a much scarier place now for some of the same reasons and many new ones. To me it feels like venturing out into the street of a metropolitan city like Chicago, where cars, taxis and people are moving every second and sidewalk is littered with all kinds of people, most who don't care but some hate and want to hurt you. Less than a decade ago it was more like countryside with a few small houses.

Despite the volume of posts I make here this forum is really the last bastion for me, its not perfect, but its the only place I'm not terrified to post on.

Hey Neue..your countryside analogy is spot on.
I really don't get what they call "trolling" now either. I used to be a griefer, and I consider it different. A griefer tends to pull off well thought out practical jokes on a virtual platform like a game or interest site. Usually the person on the receiving end would be a little pee'd but usually see a funny side to it. SomethingAwful was a good one for that. But these days this "trolling" is simply a competition of who can abuse someone the most, and it's not even intellectual humour it's simple outright abuse like spamming inboxes with hate mail and fascism, defamating a person's character when they have a clean sheet, going after their families, desecrating online memorials for the recently deceased and more.

The media have completely twisted the meaning of the word "trolling" - it means winding someone up on the Internet, usually on an Internet message board, in order to spark a reaction out of them. It can be anything from completely non-malicious to an element of maliciousness in it, but this isn't really the same as bullying and certainly isn't the same as posting hateful, vile abuse on tribute pages and harassing people's families. That's criminal behaviour.

Thanks for clarification

Yeah, I do. I still feel way more comfortable with talking to people online than face to face but I'm still pretty shy with people online, especially on MSN and chat because you don't have too much time to think about what you're going to say unlike e-mail. I express myself better in writing as well. Usually I'll go to topics that interest me and that you have a common ground interest/experience with the people with whom you are talking to.

yes, I'm OK to begin with, then get too into it, then think I've gone too far, then hide. It's a frequent pattern and happening to me here on WP now.

Jason

I got "yelled at" on line and I have been a little leery of going back to Facebook since then.

People can be quite cruel when they don't have to face you.

Agreed. 10-odd years ago I loved communicating with others over the internet. AIM, e-mail, PM's, all of that, but now it's hard for me even to post here. Most of the time I have something I want to say, so I type it out, and then re-read it and edit it, and then decide it's stupid or doesn't add to the conversation, so then I delete it. Same with FB. I hardly ever post there anymore, and often when I do I end up deleting whatever I managed to post. Or, if nobody responds, I get upset because clearly everybody hates me and thinks I'm an idiot, so then I stop going to various sites for weeks to months until the "uproar" dies down, because I'm convinced that everybody is talking about me in private.

Now I can barely be bothered to post anywhere anymore unless somebody is asking a question that I know the answer too. Questions are always easier to reply to.